Hi notanantiGnostic

i'm working towards jung, i'll take your recommendations first

i'm already very familiar with Joseph Campbell and Alvin Boyd Kuhn's work

two of my favourite writers

both took a brave stand against the literalist fallacy and fought a very good fight

Massey i haven't had a chance to get to yet but he's on my list

i am more or less aquainted with the other stuff you mentioned but of course time is so short so i hope to get to them as i may

thanks for all the pointers and good luck with the study yourself, i found once i got free of the literalist delusion and picked up on symbolism and metaphor that nature herself could teach me so much

it's such a simple thought but truth when rightly apprehended just feels great

these days as soon as i get that "less pleasant feeling" i know either me or someone near is getting it wrong

if you are following what is good who can harm you eh.

again thanks and more power to you

I would like to share my experience of studying with The Gnostic Movement as I am also someone who has left the organisation after having being involved for many years and I was also a teacher. However, my experience is quite different to what has been described here.

When I started my ‘spiritual’ search, I was very cautious as I had dabbled in many different things that ended up being no good and in the beginning with Gnosis I was there just to see if the things being taught were effective. I didn’t have any intention to become a follower of any theory or become a member of any kind of cult. I just wanted to look more into life and into me, to understand things, to gain experience and to improve myself.

Before this I had been walking down a fairly destructive path and Gnosis helped me to make some fairly significant changes in my life. I learned a lot about my negative inner states and behavior so I kept going, putting a lot of effort into practicing so I could understand things more and wanting to also share with others about what I learned which is why I wanted to teach.

During my time in Gnosis and in the process to become a teacher I didn’t in any way experience the things that are mentioned here about abuse, emotional battery and social control. All I was shown was encouragement and support.

Quite a few of the people that were in my class stopped coming along after a while and others continued on. It is like anything that requires effort – some are willing to put in that effort, others are not, some lose motivation, some don’t agree with the teaching or don’t want to abandon beliefs they hold to be true, and there are others, like me, who see the value of Gnosis and who want to change and improve themselves but who hit a stumbling block somewhere along the way.

It was seen as something quite normal for people to come and go and I didn’t think of those people that left as being negative or evil. Of course it is up to each person how they are going to look at you when you are not part of the organisation anymore and maybe what you say could be the case for a few people, but that it is up to the individual and their understanding. I have maintained a good relationship and friendships with people from The Gnostic Movement even though I am no longer part of it.

About the individual understanding, this also relates to the forums on their website. It is mentioned here about how sometimes people would get answers in the forums that they didn’t agree with or didn’t help them etc. But those who answer the forums are students or teachers learning just like anyone else. It is people sharing things from their own understanding and experience. When I was a teacher I learned things as I went along a lot of times from making mistakes and trying to correct those, which is the whole point of Gnosis. The difference is that when you are teaching there is more responsibility to get things right, and to improve on things so that you reflect accurately what the teachings of Gnosis are about. Of course, an answer in the forums could also be correct but for one reason or another we react to that because it doesn’t fit with what we want to be true or what we believe to be the case, even if we have no experience of the thing we are disagreeing with.

For example, some here believe that Mark is someone evil and abusive, but this is put forward by people who have not even met him. I, and a good friend of mine, who is also no longer in the Movement, have met Mark on a number of occasions. He is nothing like how you describe. From both of our experience, we only found him to be someone sincere, honest and caring and a teacher who from what I have seen, teaches from the heart and with a lot of experience behind him.

He doesn’t live off donations that go into the organisation as it is said here. Several years ago I used to be the treasurer of the organisation and everything was always done by the books and by the law. No-one profits, all courses are free, everyone who works there works as a volunteer.

Related to the teacher called Jordan, who it is said here used all methods of intimidation at his disposal, it seemed very strange to read this, because both my friend and I knew Jordan when we were in the movement and he is one of the most unintimidating people I knew, a young guy, quite humorous and funny and very sincere, nothing scary or intimidating about him whatsoever.

I understand very well and I sympathize when people here talk of feeling fear, depression, anxiety and so on. However what we feel and experience is based on our own psychology and how we face and deal with things. When I stopped being part of the organisation, I also felt depression and anxiety. My conscience hammered me because inside I knew through my personal experience that there was something of value in Gnosis and without using my life to try to change and improve myself I felt like I had nothing, that there was no meaning to things. This even turned into anger, but when I looked closely at myself I saw that these emotions were a reflection of my own failures. We try to blame things external for how we feel, at least I did, but I don’t want to spend my whole life blaming this person and that person for my own emotions and inner states. The purpose in Gnosis is not to blame the events or the others for their mistakes. The purpose is to learn about yourself, and improve every aspect of you. If we don’t do that we just let the negativity fester and feed and we go through life always looking to other people and things to explain our problems and never at ourselves. Every event is an opportunity for us to learn and change, this is a thing that I have learned.

My experience with the Gnostic Movement showed me that there are genuine, sincere people there who all they are trying to do is change and improve themselves, whether someone agree with the teachings or not – which is something different. It is a shame that in this thread hatred and anger is being spread, which is the opposite of spirituality.

I wanted to share my experience and present my perspective of the Movement because I don’t think we should draw conclusions without proper experience with the organization or with the teachings.

I don't think Seekinglight has actually read what is written here, and I am rather confused.

All you do in this post is defend the Gnostic Movement and spill out the their cult speech. What exactly are your reasons for leaving? You didn't state any of that, you were too busy defending them and passing the blame on the to the failed students, a typical activity within cults.

It is really disturbing how you refer to what they do as Gnosis, when all the word Gnosis means is Knowledge and it does not imply any particular time of knowledge. You can see this in the way that it is the root word of words such as prognosis, diagnosis or Agnostic. People often like to use the word to refer to something spiritual and most like of Gnosticism but there is nothing particular in the meaning of the word.

If Mark Pritchard does not live off donations than what does he live off of? This is quite a valid question since he has been involved in nonprofit ventures since 1992. Does he have a real job? Does he live on inheritance. I know his books don't bring him in enough money. You can not claim that there is really a lack of transparency in his financial actions.

In regards to how nice a guy he is, have you considered the points of comparison made in the stockholme post that was removed from Gnosticweb? You seem to be demonstrating some of the syndromes of what my friend was referring to. If he was such a nice guy why would he write such hateful things, why such much manipulation and cult speach. Feel free to dispute any of the dishonest language I have pointed out. That would be great fun.

Yes and in regards to Jordan. Did you spend 5 months as one of his students? Did you get personally attacked by him on this site? Did you actually read what he wrote? Yes Jordan is a scronny little dork, but that does not stop him from parroting the cult speach of his master or finding other ways to make people feel that they need the teachings of the Gnostic Movement. The difficulty of such a situation is that someone like him is a victim and a victimizer. He is indoctrinated but he also indoctrinates.

Oh and if Jordan was really here to deal with dishonesty that was spoken, where did he go? Why is he not continuing to fix this problem, correct my errors and point out my lies? Were you send here to do it for him? What is exactly is your position in the Gnostic Movement, Seekinglight?

Yes I am angry, and the teachings of egos are bullshit. The dishonest behaviour and the teachings of the movement are one and the same. This is all an effort to manipulate and it is done by very sick people. When there is injustice the right action is to be angry and take action against it. Why does no one from the Gnostic Movement come and defend themselves? Because the can't without resorting to their cult speech.

Hi seekinglight

what about the sexual alchemy did you personally get into that, was it part of the movement then as it is now

were you at any stage encouraged to not ejaculate as a means of mystically changing those energies into something that could transform you into a better person

did you teach others that a good way to improve themselves would be to copulate while doing a mantra then at the last minute stop just before the "spasm" and then let those energies be used to morph you into a better human

did you witness anyone say anything like "hey it's my sex life, whether i come or not is my business "

were there people who were part of the movement but thought that not ejaculating was completely useless as a means of becoming more spiritual

were there people there who were turning to celibacy because they just couldn't engage in intercourse without coming

to me the whole "you'll be better off if you dont ejaculate" thing really made me stop and think "something is very wrong here"

what about you personally, do you still refrain from ejaculation

i was also very dubious when threads addressing this issue (no pun intended) were completely removed from the gnostic web forums and belzebuub forums, why remove mention of the whole non ejaculatory aspect of the group

i think there is nothing particularly helpful in not ejaculating

it's a great part of being a human

orgasm, sex, ejaculation etc etc are very wonderful things

quite frankly it's hard enough already (no pun intended) without some self proclaimed gnostic (samael aun weor) telling me the way to a better spirituality is to cease ejaculating

personally you find what you find

but i find outward denial of natural urges rather silly, like a self imposed hardship is the last thing you need, it has to come from within (no pun intended)

seekinglight there a few questions that I have been asked to ask of you from someone is not quite ready to speak out against the Movement. Now why would people be hesitant about questioning such a nice guy as Pritchard?

Seeker, can you explain why you left the movement then? You say it changed your life, that your experiences within it were nothing but positive and changed who you were. Why then, did you leave? What pushed you away from 'the work'?

Have you honestly never heard that people leave because they are influenced by their own egos or the black lodge? Can you give us one example where someone has left, has shared their reasons for leaving and had it accepted by the movement as genuine? Have the teachers/members/Beelzebub ever said "Yes, maybe this aspect of things could have been done differently, maybe we need to change things, maybe this was wrong"?

Do you or do you not hold the belief that orgasm will lead you to hell and cause spiritual failure and that orgasm is the apple referred to in Genesis? Have you learnt the practice of 'alchemy' within the movement and been told things like 'connecting more than once every 24 hours weakens the energies and is a crime against divine law', 'the duty of the man is to warm up the woman and the duty of the woman is to eliminate the egos that stop her from being aroused'? Have these beliefs been communicated to you by the teachers of the movement and Beelzebub's works?

Do you or do you not believe that egos (emotions) are external entities using your mind, body and thoughts to 'manifest'? Where have you acquired this belief from? Can you substantiate this belief by any scientific, psychological or spiritual study that is not 'personal experience' or derived from the works of Beelzebub, Samael or Rabolu?

Do you deny that posts and entire threads on the forums at Gnosticweb and Beelzebub's website are deleted, if their content is not entirely complimentary or in line with the views of the website? How do you explain free speech and learning within that context? You could argue that every organisation has an image to uphold, but there is a difference between maintaining a certain cohesive viewpoint and denying an individual the right to express free views.

Seeker, as an ex treasurer of the movement, can you explain how Mark lives then, if not off the donations of the movement? Do you deny that he and Edith have not worked for many years, or done anything to generate an income? Where do they live? What do they live on?

Can you explain where the money from all the fundraising drives go? There have been 2 recently, one on GW and one on Beelzebub, each requesting about $6000. What was that money used for? Where is the transparency?

Seeker, you have not left the movement, you are very much a part of it and with my knowledge of how the movement works, this is another ploy to discredit anyone who has left and garb that in the voice of truth, authority and 'do not blame external events but look at yourself instead'. I do not wish to debate this with you, because you cannot prove you have left and I cannot prove you have not.

All I will say is that lies, even when used for a 'spiritual' purpose, are still lies and still wrong, at a moral, ethical and spiritual level. If you know a tree by it's fruit, then my point is now proven.

We will both appreciate your response. Thanks

To Seeker,

Do you know where all the information from the gnostic movement's teachings comes from?

It comes from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and other authors. Nothing that Mark Pritchard is currently teaching is new.

The idea of the five centers comes from Ouspensky. What is even worse is that Ouspensky claimed the motor center as the spine, not the upper back. The spine and parts of the brain stem send out and receive nerves that control our movements and sensations.

Ouspensky also said the emotional center was the solar plexus.He was wrong about that, as again areas of the brain are also responsible for this. The idea of egos...even that comes from Ouspensky.

Nothing that the gnostic movement is currently teaching is new. It's all plagiarized (and if I might add, with mistakes).

I think that perhaps you were cast out from the organization (just my belief) and are now posting in the forums to regain Mark's approval. Perhaps you are still practicing the techniques taught there. Perhaps you are practicing the "death" technique this instant as you are reading this post.

Many of our instincts are controlled by the subcortical regions of the brain; the instinctive center is not the lower back.

A little bit of knowledge will take you a long way in understanding the errors of Mark's teachings.

No, I'm not angry as I'm posting. I've written this post infact to you help you.

Personally, I believe that the gnostic movement is damned to failure some time in the future. It will be a shame, however, the amount of lives that it has damaged before its inevitable failure.

The technique of the death and awareness are harmful to the brain and nervous system, especially as they are done continuously.

What disturbes me though is how the techniques are working, when the anatomy is inconsistant (the centers are in all the wrong places). I don't think everyone involved in the movemnent is crazy. I just think that because the techniques do work there are non-physical entities involved. That is very disturbing.

Ejaculation is normal, and the bulk of the semen doesn't come from the testicals (in males), only the sperm cells do. That's ironic since Mark teaches that the semen is transmuted through Ida and Pingala from the testicals.

I encourage you to search these forums and read everything you can about Manuel Gomez (Samael Aun Weor), Mark Pritchard (Belzebuub) and Joaquin Amortegui (Rabolu).

Knowledge is power and, as notanantignostic put it, isn't that what "gnosis" is all about.

Great points, 2bdelusioned.

I thought I would make the point that when I said I was angry I did not mean angry towards seekinglight or the movement in general I meant the leadership and those who personally lied to me, you know who you. There are 6 people in particular I would count at the top of the list in the last category. I see all of you as victimized and brainwashed but in the process you passed it on to people like me. You allowed your fear to get the best of you and you were taken advantage of As a result you failed your fellow human peoples around you, including me.

Thanks 2b there are many ways to knowledge as you say and truth is essential.

People can do what they like, but if one wishes to recover from a bad gnostic group, it can be well to take a breather and look at some re-assessments of Carl Gustav Jung and his social and cultural background.

Jung is revered as a primary source for insights into the unconscious but he appears to have been greatly influenced by many German occultists, most of whose work is not well known today--which means Jungs psychological processes were permeated by outdated and ideologically driven books on mythology and social evolution written by people frustrated with bouregois society. And Burgholzi, the hospital where Jung encountered many psychiatric inpatients was in a part of Switzerland that was smack dab in a seeker's circuit that was the early 20th Century equivalent of the 'hippie trail.'

And patients who consulted Jung tended to already have an interest in theosophy and occultism, making them a biased sample.

I have enjoyed reading Jung but was grateful to find Noll's book before becoming more emotionally and possibly financially involved.

One can do various creativity exercises without succumbing to a charismatic personality.

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Nationalist Essentialism
In our discussion of 19th century German culture, we cannot ignore the notion of volkisch or national essences. A national essence is an alleged group of defining characteristics that is supposed to make, say, a British person British, a German person German, or a Jewish person Jewish. The philosopher Hegel talks about the essential Spirits of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans. Prior to modern genetic theories there was no clear distinction between biology and culture. It's easy to forget that the Darwinian revolution occurred before the discovery of the genetic mechanism. Thus even after publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1861) there was no guarantee that educated people could distinguish learned habits from biologically inherited characteristics.

Biologist Ernst Haeckel was the foremost German Darwinian in the late 19th century. He was also the founder of the only pantheist religious organization prior to 1997. His group, the Monist League, survived his death and lasted until the 1930's. Many of its members later joined Hitler's Nazi Party. This was possible because Haeckel's biology had a place for notions of national or racial essences.

As a biologist, Ernst Haeckel supplied a teaching that would turn out to be important in Jung's thinking. Haeckel coined the slogan: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Ontogeny is the development of the individual being. Phylogeny is the development of the species. Haeckel's slogan means that the growth of the individual embryo (ontogeny) essentially duplicates development of the species from earlier life forms (phylogeny). Now, Haeckel himself thought that this principle would yield results in psychology. It should be possible, he thought, to "trace the stages of the development of the soul of man from the soul of the brute" (TJC, 52). Thus Haeckel thoroughly blurs the line between biology and culture.

Jung will continue this error and it will play a role in the formation of his idea of a collective unconscious.

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In 1905, in a more scientific moment, Jung showed that Nietzsche, in writing Also Sprach Zarathustra, had been inspired by an essay he had read in his youth but forgotten. This is cryptomnesia, in which one remembers the content of something to which one had been exposed without remembering the event of reading or seeing it before, so it seems that one is thinking of it for the first time. Jung soon ignored his own discovery. If he had remembered it, he might not have proposed his own idea of the collective unconscious. Jung began discovering pagan symbolism in the dreams of his patients, but he downplayed the fact that these symbols were widespread in the counter-cultural publications of the time. We can never rule out the possibility that patients whose dreams contained pagan symbols had seen them earlier in their personal lives.

Jung was familiar with 19th century spiritualism, which was "on one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis" (his own words in 1905; TAC, 52). In launching his own movement he used this strategy himself. This accounts for the maddeningly slippery nature of Jung's writings. Noll states that Jung's "psychological" theories were "constructed deliberately, and somewhat deceptively...to make his own magical, polytheist, pagan world view more palatable to a secularized world conditioned to respect only those ideas that seem to have a scientific flair to them." (TAC, xv).(6)

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Jungian Paganism, Freud and the Jews
Jung believed that just as the human race all started out pagan and only later, having lost touch with its pagan roots, became rootless, "civilized" and Christian, so Germans start out, in infancy, as spontaneous pagans, but this spontaneous religion is overlaid with the artificial ideas of monotheism. Our loss of wholeness is a loss of contact with these roots. But we can reach these roots, not by the difficult work of historical research but by going inward, digging below the personal unconscious and uncovering the collective unconscious that had only been covered over.

When Jung discovered Freud's method of psychoanalysis, he quickly saw it as a tool to uncover hidden resources buried within. But while Freud welcomed Jung into the psychoanalytic movement, he soon noted that Jung was uncritical of myth. He began to fear Jung would compromise the attempt to assert scientific standing for psychoanalysis. This led eventually to the Freud-Jung split. Jung retained from Freud the cult atmosphere of the analytic movement and the lack of rigorous testing of hypotheses. Unlike Freud, Jung claimed that his analytic methods could investigate a inner realm with essentially religious meaning.

Jung explained the resistance of Freud and his close followers to Jung's version of analysis in an essentially racist way. The Freudians were mostly Jews, as was Freud himself. Freudians are uninterested in pagan myths, Jung decided, because they are mostly Jews. The Jews came from the Middle East, which was urbanized and thus depaganized at an early date. Jews had allegedly lost their pagan roots so long ago that they no longer had access to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Germanic peoples had lost their paganism at a relatively late date, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Thus the pagan collective unconscious lay close enough to the psychological surface that it could still be dug up if only one were persistent enough. Since for Jung being in touch with the collective unconscious is a precondition for psychological health, Germanic types like himself are potentially healthier than Jews.

This idea is scientifically unsound, as it confuses what can be learned with what can be biologically inherited. It also links psychological health more to one ethnic group than another and could easily provide a rationale for anti- Semitism. Jung tended to think of the collective unconscious in racial terms until late in his life. About 1936, when he was already 60, he realized that a stress on this aspect of his thought would not go over well in the English speaking world where Jung thought he could find the greatest number of disciples. In fact, his views about an essentially Aryan collective unconscious put him close to the kinds of things that Hitler was saying.

The Letter to Constance Long
I am not making this up. Here is a letter he wrote December 17, 1921 to Constance Long, an important American disciple then living in England. (TAC, 258-59). Long had begun to come under the influence of exiled Russian mystic Ouspensky, and Jung correctly feared that he would lose her allegiance to Ouspensky at a time when she was important to his desire to expand his influence in the English speaking world. Jung wrote:
Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful but they have [illegible].
You shall not make totems of foreign trees [ ]. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one's frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms . . .

Why do you look for foreign teachings [i.e., the Russian's]? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Why should you listen to the word of a man who is off his own soil [Ouspensky was in exile]? Truth is tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else.

Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood. . . . "

After Hitler, who also spoke incessantly of soil and blood and portrayed himself as a strong man, this document is an embarrassment for the most devout English-speaking Jungians. But there's no mistaking how Jung is thinking here. When he appeals to Long to be true to her own roots, he means the Aryan (or Indo-Germanic) roots. His point is not that Long should be loyal to her American or English roots, as distinct from Germanic roots. In fact Long was until then among Jung's most loyal disciples; and he is an ethnic German who happens to be a citizen of Switzerland.
Jung thought that Germans, English, and Anglo-Americans were all part of the Germanic family tree. The Jews, in his view, had been civilized too long--uprooted from the soil. The Russians were polluted by too much Asian/Mongolian blood. Jung thought his kind of analysis will get (Aryan) people in touch with their roots, still latent inside them, and restore their wholeness.

Jung shared these ideas with a number of individuals who became Nazis. This is not to say that Jung was a Nazi. But he made one of the same basic errors that Nazism made: he failed to distinguish acquired cultural characteristics from inherited biological ones. It is understandable that Jung, like many intelligent Germans, could be confused on this question early in the 20th century when the science of genetics was barely getting started. But he continued to believe in it into the 1950's, according to Noll; and this is strong evidence of the fundamentally problematic nature of his key concepts.

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Jung was smart enough to know that he could not scientifically prove the existence of the collective unconscious. That is why he said occasionally that what he was doing was not science but art (McGowan, 99). This may seem like a moment of candor, an admission that his work on the archetypes and the unconscious was not science, but--if Noll is right--it is at the same time a failure to be completely candid: Jung is still describing his work not as what it was, an indirect attempt to found a new pagan religion, but rather as art, something considerably more respectable in middle-class circles than paganism, especially in the early 20th century.

It will be said that Jung amassed evidence for his claims. But you cannot make a theory scientific simply by trying to find facts that might be explained by the theory. You have to try to find facts that could only be explained by the theory, and this means that you should try to show that no rival theory could explain those same events. A theory is meaningfully proposed as a scientific theory only if the proposer is willing to look seriously at rival theories that have some claim to explain the same events, in order to determine whether those theories do not do a better job.

The entire and very interesting article can be read here.

[www.wku.edu]

[www.beatrice.com]

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RH: It's amazing to me how little Jungians know or are willing to know about the origins of Jungian teachings, and how much of a personal affront they consider it when people like you so much as raise the issues.

RN: That's disturbing. I once thought that the whole Jungian, psychoanalytic thing was about consciousness, you know, facing up to stuff that might be disturbing. So when I bring stuff up, and Jungians respond by ignoring it, refusing to read it, or claiming that it's untrue, it's kind of sad to see that kind of irrational response, but it's also telling.

RH: And you're not even saying that polygamous occultism is necessarily a bad thing.

RN: No, I'm not, but that's what they're hearing. I just want them to accept that that's the foundation of their beliefs. I'm open to all sorts of things as long as we're all clear about what those things are. There is no scientific evidence to support the collective unconscious, yet analysts with medical degrees claim to help their patients to tap into it. As a society, do we want medical insurance to cover that sort of thing? Where's the line between religion and medicine? Sometimes I feel like the Ralph Nader of the Jungian world, but I've seen so many people who have been harmed by this, people who need to have their screws tightened rather than loosened. And in Jungian circles, critical thinking is looked down upon. It's devalued in favor of emotion or intuition. That bothers me, as does the idea that myth and the emotional response to myth is more important to historical facts. To Jung, it didn't matter whether or not a story was true. What mattered was the effect on the listener, how it makes him or her feel.

RH: We've seen that attitude gain in popularity in the last decade or so, and I believe we can pin it down to a very specific moment: Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on PBS.

RN: You're absolutely right. That did more to promote Jungian thought than anything during that period. Campbell was charismatic, he was great on TV, and what he was spouting was pure Jung.

RH: And Moyers has run with that ball ever since. In 1996, it was "Let's do a series about Genesis, and our need for origin myths!"

RN: I'd like to see somebody do a series on the need for critical thinking and skepticism. Carl Sagan nailed it pretty well in The Demon-Haunted World, and although he could be too smug at times, he addressed the issues straight on and his 'baloney detection kit,' a guide to critical thinking, is something I'm going to use in my classes when these issues come up. People forget that it's okay to think, to analyze situations, and they need to be reminded more often.

Again, people can do what feels good. But before investing many years of your own life and money, it is wise to do a background check on the historical forces that shaped the life and personality of the person whose work you want to study.

Its the only way to become and remain autonomous in relation to a mentor, whether dead or living.

Thanks for all your effort Corboy,

My advise on these matters is to look at everything critically, but also be skeptical of the skeptic. There are many problems with Jung and he should not be worshiped as many new agers do. They also over simplify what he was doing. Because of imperfections and problems in his work there is an area of work called Post- Jungian Psychology. One area that may be of particular interest to those who maintain an interest in the esoteric after leaving an esoteric cult would be look into Archetypal psychology.

Richard Noll, the author of Jung Cult has a serious bias of his own. As a convert to general Protestantism he feels threatened by Jung's work. From the quotes that you posted he fails to realized or wish to mention that Jung also essentially rejected his protestant upbringing. So along with holding said views about Jewish people he would also be critical of the protestant establishment. This was caused by experiences that happened to Jung in his early childhood, both in family experience and in more personal experiences.

Why is it that people are willing to be critical of the influences of someone like Carl Jung but not Isaac Newton, who actually believe in alchemy and other occultist ideas? Or Albert Einstein who read alchemy text before going to bed almost every night. The scientific revolution is full of influences from the reemergence of ancient wisdom. The attack on Jung by Noll is very much fueled by totalitarian and absolutist thinking, however it may be hard to see as it is the kind that is most predominant in our modern world. The mindset he is promoting would also be against most holistic worldview. What is neglected in this discussion is this Volk culture in the Germanic world was common in the culture of the time and was not exclusive to racists.

Freud and Jung split on two matters spirituality and Sex. Noll neglects to mention, at least in the quotes offered that Freud was also an atheist,who insisted on his own dogma being followed. On sex Freud felt that they energy of the body was entirely sexual, much like the teachings of Samael Aun Weor. In fact that is likely were that ideas comes from. Jung felt the lebedo was of a more general energy. As a result teachers in the Gnsotic Movement are very much against Jung.

Having said all this I would say don't take anyones work as gospel and be critical of everything. Your critical thinking skills are very important.

Here is a good critique of the cult of Jung.


[www.whiterabbit.net]

Personally I see it as trivializing the modern concept of a cult. In a way it is using the biased concept of cult, as that being any religious activity that is not protestant. Did he look at all the Quantum Physicists like Wolfgang Pauli, Jung worked with?

I really like Jung but I also know not take in whole anyone elses work. There is actually a great quote from Jung that should help anyone who has left an "esoteric" cult. I can remember the exact wording but it goes something like this, there is no such thing as secret societies in that they do not actually have secret knowledge, just secret believes or believe systems, however they may have stumbled unconsciously onto insights of the psyche. The last point about learning about the the pysche can be discarded, this point is most specifically relevant to secret societies that have some heritage in alchemy.

Although I can't find the quote I am referring to have found a relevant quote from Psychology and Alchemy in relevance to the creation of the Rosicrucians, the first time around, "For the whole raison d'etre of a secret society is to guard against a secret that has lost its vitality and can only be kept alive as an outward form." Pg 431. Not exactly the point I wanted to express but it is of a similar sentiment.